United Earth Directorate
The United Earth Directorate (UED) is an interstellar, inter-government strategic military alliance and successor to the now-defunct United Powers League (UPL), it itself the successor to the United Nations of Earth. Established in the December of 2499, its official formation was an attempt to stop “rampant corruption” within the leading rings of the upper echelons of the UPL government and promote a functioning cohabitation among the Unified Nations of Earth and Her Colonies. It was only after the defeat of the Koprulu Expeditionary Force (7th Expeditionary Force,' 7EXPFOR') in the latter part of 2501 that the UED Council released their knowledge of extraterrestrial species and its intention to combat, contain, and control them while maintaining the original mission of bringing the Koprulu Sector under its protection. At its founding, the UED had already procured some 458 extrasolar governments from the Six Interstellar Superpowers throughout the twenty-five lightyear diameter sphere the Colonial Race had managed to reach before the Reclamation Wars of 2449: the 28 governments of the Sirian Interplanetary Union, the 64 governments of the Procyon System Alliance, the 91 countries of Luytenite Combine, 89 sovereign states of the Tau Ceti Interstellar Collective, 87 in the Bernard’s Star Hegemony, and 99 in the Unified Centauri States. Together with the 200 governments of Earth, the membership of the United Earth Directorate has come to sit at some 658 member-states. The headquarters of the United Earth Directorate is in Prague, Czech Republic, with further main offices in Moscow in Russia, Frankfurt in Germany, Johannesburg in South Africa, and Boston in the United States of America. (MENTION OTHER MEMBER-STATES & OBSERVING STAR-NATIONS HERE) The organization is financed through mandatory monetary tithes to the Ministry of Financing by member-states. Its objectives include maintaining interstellar peace and security through unifying all human worlds, promoting human purity, protecting the environment to ensure the purity of man, and providing humanitarian aid in cases of famine, natural disaster, and armed conflict. During global radical changes in response to worsening acts of religious zealotry and terrorism, the governments of the world established the United Powers League, the successor United Nations government to replace the ineffective international combine in an effort to maintain human purity, in the Spring of 2229. The actions lead to mass eviction of the worst criminals—thieves, rapists, murderers, religious zealots, and other people deemed to have broken the Moral Human Code set forth by the First Congress of the United Powers League: namely mutants, unnecessarily cyber-augmented peoples, and other political dissidence. It was driven by the then-Russian Federation president Pyotr Alexeyev, and supported by the world’s most militaristically and financially strong superpowers: the German Federation, French Republic, Egyptian Republic, and Republic of Great Britain. Though the United States of America was still recovering from a massive economic collapse caused by a failed economic policy and a failed two-party political system, the President of the United States (as well as Congress) supported their Russian allies in the push for the Purity Movement. When the UPL as replaced by the UED, there came a reformation of the principle organs that created the Unified Government of Mankind: the United Earth Directorate Council (the executive branch), the General Assembly (the main legislative and deliberative assembly); Chamber of Unified Arms (to decide if and how certain peacekeeping operations will be conducted), Secretariat (for providing studies, information, facilities, and financial control over the UED), Interstellar Court of Justice (the primary judicial organ), Economic and Social Council (for promoting international economic and social co-operation and development), and the House of Specialized Agencies (to provide a control over agencies that do not fall under the other six organs). Since December 2499, the UED has declared that its Reclamation Campaign to be put on hold until the humans in the Koprulu Sector are pacified and brought under a “natural and just” ruling of the United Earth Directorate. Historical Background As humanity began to reach into the 23rd Century, the Earth had already become far too small for the almost 30 billion people living on its shrinking land masses. Wild technological advancement led to environmental disasters. Religious extremism became the second leading cause to regional destabilization next to ever-limiting natural resources. A unique and uniting ideology grew across Europe and spilled into the American continents, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa: a secular view of the Purity of the Human Form in the face of rampant cyberization of the human body, the unhindered and growing mutant population, the degeneration of humanity through religious fanaticism and/or plain worship of non-proven entities, inherently destructive ideologies such as pure-capitalist economies and the like. In the United Nation’s place grew the United Powers League, promising an end to all that was destroying Humanity and acting in sweeping motions to purge those unworthy of this new, “enlightened, socialist world.” United Powers League The United Powers League (UPL) was formed on November 22nd, 2229, following the decline of Western civilization and the seeming breakdown of society that started in the 22nd Century. It succeeded the defunct United Nations and is the predecessor to the United Earth Directorate. It promoted an “enlightened” form of socialism that, at its core, was almost identical to the Nazi Party’s Third Reich in its fascist approach to governing the world. Unhindered by nations that only a few years before called for an end to its treachery, the UPL worked quickly to reinstate many countries under its rule, casting aside monarchies and religious-driven theocracies for those based on secular and scientifically driven governments. From its sweeping popularity to its official instatement as the united world government in 2229, the UPL police-state found itself controlling most of the Earth, including close to 93% of the population—almost 27.9 billion people—excluding the volatile western South American countries of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. The UPL sought to enforce conformity in the name of their totalitarian view of socialism, establishing the Unitariate Commission one of the first acts of the First Congress of the United Powers League. Its mission as an official office of the United Powers League was to bring about the Divinity of Mankind through scientific and social enlightenment. Unitariate agents used violence and terror to bring an end to ethnic boundaries and route out racism everywhere, citing the Human Morality & Purity Act of 2230, signed into practice on December 8th, 2229. At the same time, english was imposed as the official language of the United Powers League—already being the unifying voice of international economics—while other languages were banned, chiefly the various dialects of those South American countries that did not come under the UPL’s fold under the Edict of Social Unification signed into practice during the Second Congress on April 1st, 2230. As with racism and the cleansing of ethnic separation, the Unitariate Commission began systematically banning religion in 2231 under the Scientific Enlightenment Act on June 25th, 2231, during the Third Congress of the United Powers League. Minor civil conflicts flared throughout the American mid-west, the Middle East, and the Southern Asian islands (the most religious regions of the world), which the Unitariate Commission sought to quell with sustained bombing campaigns. UPL leaders were less interested in getting these regions to submit to the future of humanity than they were with obliterating religion as a whole and after reviewing the history of both mid-western and Bible-Belt America as well as the Middle East, decided that eradicating the populations of the area was easier than converting them into the Age of Human Enlightenment. After several years, even into the race to colonize the Solar System, these regions were crushed underfoot, either by sustained bombing campaigns or using on-the-ground troops, and forced into submission. Religion in general faded into nothing but a long and terrible footnote in human history. To demonstrate the horrendous nature that was religion, many of the conflicts in those few uncontrolled South American countries were often times willfully and incorrectly labeled as Religious Conflicts when in reality the warring was often times because of limit resource, space, and ethnic strife. With the crippling boundaries of the Old World fading, the UPL successfully developed new advanced technologies, reopening many fields of science that had been largely ignored for centuries under its jurisdiction: non-nuclear renewable energies, large-scale hydroponic facilities for food-staved megacities, massive free and international wireless-communications, broadening the fields of astronomy and aerospace sciences to prepare for the inevitable human expansion into the stars—the UPL was able to achieve that and much more only through the total eradication of racism, religion, and harmful economic policies. Most notably, UPL scientists developed the warp drive and cryonic technologies, opening the newest frontiers in space. Within forty years, the UPL founded colonies on the surface, orbits, and moons of the planets in the Solar System. Project Purity Project Purity (often times written as PROJECT PURITY and also known as Project Purification) was a secret and violent operation conducted by top agents of the Unitariate Commission and authorized by the Second Congress of the United Powers League through the Human Morality & Purity Act. The mission of this covert project was to neutralize any persons whom the hard-line members of the UPL viewed as having irrevocably stepped outside of the allowable scope of conformity that was deemed necessary for the successful future of Mankind. While a secular organization, the UPL embraced the philosophy of “mankind’s divinity” to an alarming degree of fanaticism. Scholars argued that genetic alteration, unnecessary cyber-augmentation, and the use of psychoactive drugs led to the degeneration of the human species. Project Purification was the violent realizations of the UPL’s aggressive ideology set in motion through the Unitariate Commission, its goal to remove mutations and unnecessary cybernetic prosthetics (cyberprosthetics) from the human population. Rounding up political dissidents; hackers; synthetics; the superficially, cybernetically enhanced; tech-pirates; and criminals of every kind the Unitariate Commission made certain to detain . It was determined that their removal would ensure mankind's purity and survival as species in the wake of ever increasing cybernetic enchantments and mutations altering human gene pool. "Project Purification" was signed into practice as a sub-clause of the Human Morality & Purity Act of 2230. Under a social media blackout and heavily monitored public security protocols, a covert campaign of generalized genocide saw the deaths of 400 million people—1.5% of the total population—to eradicate those chronically nonconformist. The state controlled media and its social media blackout allowed the general populace to remain ignorant of the true scope of the violence done against mutants, cyborgs, political dissidence, and criminals from petty theft to the most egregious acts against another human being. Project Purification lasted for nearly eighty years. Colonizing the Koprulu Sector In 2229, a young, talented Doran Routhe was approached by the newly formed United Powers League and members of its Unitariate Commission and Board of Astronautics. He had been recognized for his work in cryogenics during his doctoral studies, having actually moved the field forward upon receiving his doctorate. Dr. Routhe’s work had effectively placed him as a one of the leading particle physicists in cryogenics, and while it was his scientific achievements that had placed the spotlight on Routhe, it was his parallel political views that gave him an opportunity to head a team of noteworthy scientists to further the field of cryogenic physics even further. The Board of Astronautics gave him the ambitious goal of long-distance interstellar cryogenics. Routhe worked with his peers (the team named CRYO) to perfect the cryogenic chambers used to store medical patients awaiting treatments for diseases impossible to treat. Given criminals and political prisoners as test subjects, Dr. Routhe was able to produce the cryogenic stasis pods that would allow deep-space travel. The stress of theoretical radiation experienced by theoretical warp-travel was suggested to be the second most-likely cause of human death next to time. With those two dangers in mind, the cryogenics stasis pods (protected by layers upon layers of lead and other radiation-resistant materials) were designed, built, and tested. Hundreds of subjects died during these trials, but officials wrote off the casualties as necessary expenditures for the security of mankind’s future existence. By 2230, Doran Routhe had taken a managerial position over the Board of Astronautics’s research group developing a working warp drive, simply named AWD, and a computer engineering team known as ATLAS. Along side CRYO, the UPL had commissioned other scientists—namely, an American astrophysics scientist named Erys Compton—to create a working warp drive based off of Miguel Alcubierre’s theoretical mathematics. The team, named AWDP for Alcubierre Warp Drive Project, had been working together under the United Nations flag during the final years before its collapse, Compton having already devoted thirty years of her life to the project. As the European Space Agency became the Board of Astronautics, Compton was finally providing reproducible data; top UPL officials reviewing the data and its mission deemed the program invaluable to the future of mankind. With distances in space so vast, it was understood that no other form of faster-than-light (FTL) travel would satisfy the UPL’s mission to begin building human colonies on distant stars. As CRYO started its research and development, Compton’s team had finish an unmanned vessel (the UPLS Intrepid) equipped with the Alcubierre Warp Drive—known as both the Alcubierre drive and a warp drive. On November 15th, 2230, the Intrepid made the first successful jump out-system to Alpha Centauri ab. It returned within a week. The ATLAS Project included some of the best minds in software engineering, and had managed to produce the overall colony-support AI system for which their team was named. ATLAS—the Artificial Tele-empathic Logistics Analysis System—was intended to conduct regular CT and cerebral scans, conduct experiments on the colonists to gauge human tolerance to the Cherenkov radiation, monitor the general health of each participant, provide information for the Homeworld’s star maps, etc. The software was tested and provided to other scientific bodies for peer review. Once approved by ten or so faculties of science, the ATLAS software was kept separate from the Intrepid’s systems to maintain safe parameters for the study. The Board of Astronautics also announced that the Intrepid would jump with the colonists to provide a platform of surveillance. Others, too, built subsystems and stable computer platforms that would allow traveling inhabitants the opportunity to construct the necessary machinery and tools required to build a civilization on the edge of expected Human space, but those teams were only building on top of knowledge already gained by the two-hundred years of Space Flight. With Compton’s help, Routhe designed and built four colony ships in the Moon’s orbit for security purposes. They were massive, totaling a kilometer in length, each. They were meant to maintain ten-thousand colonists a piece and had enough equipment aboard to conduct the experiments that ATLAS would be required to do. As Routhe’s project reached its third year, however, the Board of Human Integrity had become impatient. Without finishing what he reported as “proper amount of trials,” Dr. Routhe was forced to move farther ahead in the project timeline than he wanted to. After sorting through the remaining 56,000~ political prisoners detained by the Board of Human Integrity’s PROJECT PURITY, Dr. Routhe submitted 40,000 colonists for his ultimate goal. It was then that the Board of Astronautics asked where the colonists should go. With Compton’s support, Routhe submitted the star Gantris Ceti 2313 (Gant. Cet. 2313) in the Cetus Constellation. Gantris Ceti 2313 was 2142.8 lightyears (657.0 parsecs) from the Sun among hundreds of thousands of other stars in the Gantris Nebula, and while the future passengers would be placed in cryogenic trays to withstand the possible negative side effects of a new and as-of-yet unproven warp drive systems for the much more massive supercarriers, the test subjects would have allowed Dr. Routhe the opportunity to reach and interview them if both the cryogenics and warp-engines worked perfectly. There, the 40,000 colonists would be able to settle the proven Earth-like planet of Gantris Ceti 2313(f), or Gantris VI. In 2231, the United Powers League Board of Astronautics unveiled four supercarriers—the Nagglfar, Argo, Reagan, and Sarengo—that had been secretly built in high orbit since the end of 2229. Fitted with the new Alcubierre warp drives, the Board of Astronautics stowed thousands of cryogenically frozen undesirables (criminals, political dissidence, and the genetically inferior) away within the cryogenic holds and launched the mission to Gantris Ceti from high-Earth orbit. The unmanned warp-drive test vessel, the Intrepid, followed the four supercarriers as their engines took them to the far-reaches of the solar system. As directed, ATLAS guided the four ships to Neptune’s orbit and engaged the four colony ships’ finalized Alcubierre drives. On August 9th, 2231, ATLAS engaged the ships’ warp drives and made way for Gantris VI. The voyage would take one year. As the supercarriers, bearing their exiled human cargo, disappeared into warp space beyond Neptune, United Powers League leaders were already moving to expand their territories into the planets orbiting Sol. It was understood that the soonest that the Homeworld would hear from the Gantris Mission would be a little over thirty-six months, or three years. The Intrepid would have to take the date collected by ATLAS and return to the Solar System’s outer orbits before making its approach homeward. Within forty years, the Solar System was completely colonized—Mars and its dome-states and tether-orbital cities; the massive orbital-states of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus; the outer-system deep space platform colonies—and marked the domination of the UPL over Sol and her satellite-children. The political dissidents, genetically inferior, and cyborg menace—those prisoners frozen aboard the warp-trapped coffins—were almost, nearly forgotten. While the UPL was unaware that the four supercarriers had experienced twenty-eight years of warp-travel, UPL leaders were unconcerned that the Nagglfar and her sister ships failed to return the Intrepid to the Homeworld by the third year. As time stretched on into its fifth year, the disappearance wasn’t so much a concern to the United Powers League as it was a curiosity. As the sixth year passed, the Intrepid finally appeared within the Solar System with word that the Nagglfar, Argo, Reagan, and Sarnego had failed to return to real space with their observation escort. The Intrepid AI suggested—based on the original flight path—where the ships could have arrived if they so exited the warp. As it had been instructed in such a situation, instead of returning to Earth orbit, the Intrepid began its search, warping out-system and along the flight-path to Gantris Ceti to suggested star systems within the four supercarrier’s paths. By the time the Intrepid returned home, the UPL was embroiled in a bitter and violent colonial war with several colonies that had been raised in the unmanned ships’ absence, some 262 years later. There was general surprise that the Intrepid had ever survived for so long without large-scale maintenance, but what the Intrepid AI had to say sent panic and curiosity throughout the United Powers League just as the last bastion of rebellion—the Centauri colonies—fell to the UPL Armed Forces. ATLAS had malfunctioned and sent the Nagglfar, Argo, Reagan, and Sarengo through a twenty-eight year journey, overshooting their original destination by 57,857.2 light years (17,739.1 parsecs). This new sphere of human influence in the stars, known as the Koprulu Sector, was 60,000 light years away from Sol and located in the trailing arm of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm between the 40º and 50º Galactic Longitude. It was surprising that humanity had even thrived well enough to blossom into the three ruling factions that existed: the Umojian Protectorate, the Kel-Morian Combine, and the now-defunct Terran Confederacy. The people of the former Terran Confederacy was reeling from a civil war that had blossomed in the midst of a larger interstellar war between two alien life forms: the innumerable and vicious zerg, and the powerful and cold protoss. The Terran Confederation had collapsed into another star-nation called the Terran Dominion, which was still attempting to stave off the overflowing collateral damage caused by those two warring species. Frightened by the implications of not only one, but two, violent extraterrestrial races of some sentience, the UPL was forced to reform into what is the United Earth Directorate today, it’s mission being to combat the possible threat of interstellar conflict on the fringes of Human Space. Reformation into the United Earth Directorate By 2499, United Powers League had long-since changed from its former, hardline socialist self. The totalitarian, strict version of socialism had become a mixture of loosely-monitored interstellar capitalism and self-serving fascism. Over two-hundred years of political and social changed had broadened the multi-nation into something that resembled the United Nations before. The Unitariate Commission no longer held secret witch hunts for mutants and the cyber-augmented, instead of relying on local governments to deal with the “problem” as they saw fit. As ATLAS had observed during its long jump to the Koprulu Sector, Humanity was beginning to develop more psychic-capable men and women that no mass-eradication could fully eliminate. Whereas physical deformities brought on by radioactive exposure prior to birth or other factors were often viewed as detrimental to the ongoing evolution of Mankind, psychics were given a social acceptance that several centuries before would have been punishable in a court of law. Allowed to develop, grew more specialized subclasses—telekinetics, pyrokinetics, electrokinetics, etc.—being a “psionic sensitive” (PS) (also known as a “psionic”) had become a special and and celebrated thing, though it was widely understood as being a “luck of the genetic draw.” The slow change of Unitariate-influenced social opinion of this sort of genetic mutation had eventually been deemed inevitable as the UPL core worlds began adopting the views of the star systems brought under the fold during the Reclamation Wars. Just as psionic and psychokinetic acceptance had become deep seeded, so had the wide-spread recreational and aesthetic use of cybernetics returned. With the UPL’s attention fully occupied by the Reclamation Wars funds had been pulled almost in its entirety from the Unitariate Commission’s accounts. Without its funding, its activities had been reduced to finding and terminating political dissidence, quelling uprisings before they even happened. It was that reduced presence that men and women alike were returning to installing wetware into their brains, removing limbs for popular utility tools to make their lives easier, adopting light-based tattoo fields that could be changed into intricate designs within moments of choosing a custom pattern; the list went on. Whereas the social reform that the UPL had once stood on as a movement toward bettering the survivability of the human race had devolved into something lackluster and old-notioned, the hard-cracking and anti-dissident governments continued to bear weight and influence over the star systems closest to the Homeworld. Structure of the Directorate Coming soon. Membership Coming soon. Objectives of the UED Coming soon. Funding An Alliance Coming soon. Unified Armed Forces Within the United Earth Directorate Unified Armed Forces, the militaries of the Directorate are semi-independent. Meaning, all member-states within the UED are entitled to their own standing militaries so long as a portion of their standing, combative strength is dedicated to the Chamber Minister of the Unified Armed Forces. Currently, all member-states are expected to maintain a military that is at least ten percent to that of their citizenry and of that ten percent, 60% of that standing force—across both their armies and space navies—is ready and able to respond to the call issued by the Minister of Unified Arms. To that obligation, the militaries are expected to be equipped with the best equipment produced by the Unified Arms Act of 2445. In response to this expectation, member-states capable of meeting the demand placed upon have raised recruiting demands in their defense and war ministries that cater to the needs of the United Earth Directorate. For the last one-hundred years, the Russian Federation has been the leading-state of both the United Powers League, and its successor, the United Earth Directorate. That position isn’t limited to the Consul seat of the UED Council but the Chamber Minister of the Unified Armed Forces. That power has allowed Russian arms manufacturers to have the dominant hold over the defense market, providing not only small arms but new and improved power armor (Stukov Heavy Industries) for the UED Interstellar Terrestrial and Maritime Forces, weapons for that power armor (Cherenchikov Multinational Corporation), and even some of the heavier armored vehicles (the Russian Motor Corporation) and starships (Alexeyev Shipwright LLC.) Other arms manufacturers are allowed to build for a country’s own standing, protective force within the 40% allowed as well as paramilitary entities, but all units that fall under the Unified Armed Forces High Command must comply with the standardization set by the Chamber of the Unified Armed Forces. Whereas each member-state must maintain their own military force, there is a command structure in place to command and coordinate this highly diverse military. Despite the diversity, the UED has been shown to work effectively even between military units from different parts of the Human Sphere. To help maintain this level of coordination, UAF High Command has deemed it necessary that all battle chatter be conducted in Russian regardless of nationality. Technology Coming soon. Criticisms Coming soon. Known Members of the UED Bureau of Unified Interstellar Ground Forces (UED Army) * Commandant (General, 0F-6 NATO) Tomas Miloshek, UED Military Academy * Major Dane Kilbourne, UED Military Academy * Lieutenant Thomas Dufay, French Republic Army (Armée de terre) * Sous-officer adjoint Richard Asselineau, French Republic Army (Armée de terre) * Sergent Arnaud M’Mohn, French Republic Army (Armée de terre) Bureau of Unified Interstellar Maritime Forces (UED Space Navy) * Admiral Gerard DuGalle, UED Naval High Command * Vice-Admiral Alexei Stukov, UED Office of Naval Intelligence * Captain, 1st Rank Abraham Malmsteen, United States Navy * Capitaine de corvette ''Annette Farooq, French Republic Navy (''Marine Nationale) * Capitaine de corvette Axelle Batteux, French Republic Navy (Marine Nationale) * Lieutenant de vaisseau Ninon Manoury, French Republic Navy (Marine Nationale) * Lieutenant de vaisseau Erec Jacquemoud, French Republic Navy (Marine Nationale) * Lieutenant de vaisseau François Philippon, French Republic Navy (Marine Nationale) * Enseigne de vaisseau de première classe Guilbert Piaget, French Republic Navy (Marine Nationale) * Enseigne de vaisseau de première classe Laure Hébras, French Republic Navy (Marine Nationale) * Michman (Warrant Officer 1st Class, OR-9b NATO) Richard Harry, UED Office of Naval Intelligence * Petty Officer 1st Class Tessa “Johnny” Johansson, 1st Naval Security Regiment (Solar Regiment, ONI) * Marine 384DTA47631 (Special Forces Operator), PIB-2 (SOR-1, Office of Naval Intelligence) State Paramilitary & Civilian Agencies * Mr. Ed Smith * Mr. Cole * Mr. Johnson Known Territories Coming soon. Stellar Neighbors Coming soon. Acknowledgements * UED Logo used above is from Praxor23's render for their Stellaris mod